All dressed up and nowhere to go

The ongoing OBC quota saga is a recognition of the need of the politically established to be part of the urban “happening set”

Rohan D’Souza Delhi

The Other Backward Castes (OBC) quota this time around is not principally about caste discrimination or about merit. It is not even about vote-bank politics. The OBCs have already arrived as India’s most powerful political class; both north and south of the Vindhyas. For any understanding of the current agitation it is, therefore, crucial that Mandal I of 1990 be clearly distinguished from Mandal II of 2006.

The events of Mandal I essentially centred on giving a slice of the administrative job pie to aspiring sections within the OBC community. In many ways, the agitation of 1990 was about the struggle between the mismatched strengths of the middle-class, upper-caste youth against that of the emergent aspirations of a confident OBC. Two critical  aspects of the agitation were that the predominantly rural OBC elites were, on the one hand, attempting to move into urban contexts through government jobs; while, on the other, they were also trying to connect their already evident political dominance with the new found acquisition of bureaucratic power.

The early 1990s, however, was also a watershed period for India. Most significantly, the New Economy was being assembled amidst the uneven dismantling of the Nehruvian mixed economy and the break down of the Congress social alliance (upper castes, minorities and dalits). In the almost sixteen-odd years following Mandal I, the New Economy today has created a distinct reality. Instead of license-capitalism, command-driven production, economic self-reliance or saving-based consumption, it is now the explosion of high finance, business process outsourcing, information technology, software exports, media, entertainment, corporate health care, consultancies, brokerage, real estate speculation and, above all else, the endless search for the “good life”. It is not the economy for the fainthearted. It has called into being a hitherto entirely different skill set of technological competence, global cultures, international social connections and want-driven consumption.

But these children of the New Economy have, like never before, also created their own type of social capital or caste. While it is no longer a monstrously uphill task to make the journey from the rural to the low urban, for many castes it is now almost impossible to climb the final high social walls of the New Economy. In other words, in the New Economy doors continue to open for the socially pre-packaged and only the odd straggler is let in. It is perhaps not wrong to argue that the style of wealth acquisition in India today continues to remain within relatively closed social circuits and narrow cultural loops. It is a fact that the upper/forward castes or the general category continue to reign supreme in the high-end jobs of the New Economy.

Meanwhile, government jobs are drying up and there has been an incredible thinning in bureaucratic possibilities and opportunity. Hemmed in thus, increasingly, in northern India the high end of the OBCs have become specialists of politics, the middle rung are contractors and policemen, while large chunks wallow in the depressed rural economy.

Put differently, the social bases of the New Economy and that of the managers of political infrastructure are distinct and non-overlapping. Thus, the elite OBCs dominate politics and the elite upper castes control the New Economy and Mandal II is fundamentally about the tension over this disconnect between the economic and the political in India.

While, the elite upper castes who control the New Economy strive to neutralise political intervention in liberalised economic spaces, the dominant political OBC classes are forced to turn into political specialists. Thus, especially in northern India, the OBCs as economic outlaws are becoming political robin-hoods.

If the New Economy is not allowed to widen its social base, caste will become its feet of clay.

The author is an assistant professor, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi